Solstice Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “And what else?”

  Iris hesitated. In the exacting world of fairy tale, that seemed fair: Iris was getting two for one. But she seemed uncertain, and made what sounded like a terribly reckless bid. “What more do you want?” she asked the fairy queen. “What do you want that I can give you?”

  The woodland queen didn’t answer immediately. She dismounted, causing a minor galaxy of glittering fires to move across her from crown to foot. She took a step closer to Iris, where the shelter of trees ended and the lawn began. Iris didn’t step back, but she did grasp Sylvia’s arm, maybe to stop herself.

  “You turn back our paths of flowing water,” the queen said. “You block our passageways through tree and well and pond; you thread your thorns and weedy vines between our worlds as though you own them both. As you close our paths, you close your minds to us. In your thoughts you keep us trapped in some bleak place that you must never enter, no matter how our ancient wonders call to you across the boundaries. We are the word you must not say, the food you must not eat, the wine you must not drink, the forbidden love, the dangerous wood, that which tempts and lures and always, always destroys. Is that all we are to you?”

  “Yes,” Iris said. Her changeling granddaughter’s face turned toward her then, and Iris cleared her throat. “Until tonight. Until now. That is what we have always been taught.”

  “Then this is what I want,” the woodland queen said, taking another step, and then another, toward her. It was as though we watched a river spilling over its banks, and if Iris did not move back she might be swept away and drowned. She stayed stubbornly rooted, though behind her, a few of the guild members in the rose garden eased toward the house.

  “What?” she asked, her voice sounding harsh, and I realized that even she was a bit unnerved. So was I, by then. Two women, one frail with age, the other young, and inexperienced, and possessing a conflicted heritage, were all that stood between our tranquil world and that fay, glittering horde.

  The queen stepped out of the wood. “To give you a different tale.”

  In the wash of light from the windows, we saw her face clearly, not the cold-eyed winter queen of Rois Melior’s manuscript, but the golden queen of summer, with her corn-leaf eyes, and her bewitching smile, and her bare feet scarcely bending a blade of Iris’s grass.

  She gave a soft call then. I tensed, preparing for the storm that Leith and I had glimpsed. The screen door banged behind us; we both jumped. A creature smelling of earth and leaf mold and vanilla musk shambled down the steps and through the roses, inspiring some colorful exclamations from the guild. Its odd, tree-imp face turned toward Iris before it passed into the wood.

  “Awesome cookies, Gram,” it said. “Thanks.”

  I could see the human faces then, emerging from the trees, tired, dirty, and about to puddle into tears of relief. They flung their arms around Iris and Sylvia, and then Judith saw her father and ran to him. The voices among the roses had risen to a piercing tumult; Iris flung her own voice into it.

  “Hush!”

  Everyone did, including a couple of mounts nervously shaking their harness bells behind the queen.

  “I took your children and sent you one of ours just for this,” the queen told her. “Not to harm you, but in hope that you might find a reason to talk to me. Our world is very old; yours is very powerful. Tales make us seem fearsome, and so we can well be. But not always. And your stitches may bind us in our world, but they also bind the beauty and the wonder in it, which so many of you, wandering in and out of our world, bring back with them to tell about.”

  “Including my granddaughter,” Iris said simply, touching Sylvia’s hair. “She turned my thoughts around, in the end.”

  “Yes,” the queen said softly. “She was very brave to come freely into our world.”

  “You saw me?” Sylvia asked.

  “Of course, I did. I made everything you saw.”

  “How did you—how did you know about the drawer pulls?”

  “I didn’t. It was you who picked them out of my random magic. You gave them significance. You found the thread. You found your own way home.”

  “Oh,” she whispered, a sound so faint it might have been lost, except that everyone else on both sides of the border seemed spellbound.

  “It will be hard,” Iris admitted, “to change the habits of centuries. Ways of looking at the world get ingrained and tenacious after so long a time. Even now, it’s hard for me to trust you.”

  The queen nodded. “I know. And I wonder when you’ll all decide you have been dreaming, and go back behind your doors to resume your stitchery, and lock yourselves away again from the world you enter, time after time, in your stories. But perhaps, if the three of us think hard enough, we will find ways to live more peacefully with one another.”

  “Maybe,” Iris answered slowly. “Maybe not. But maybe.”

  A breeze, very light and faint, stirred through the woods. I was looking, I realized finally, at an empty, dwindling cloud of fireflies. Voices were rising again; women moved, hesitantly, out of the garden toward the trees.

  Except for Dorian, who took the porch in a single bound and had her arms around Leith before he could take a step. “It’s about time!” she said fiercely, patting my arm in greeting when she could spare a hand.

  Tarrant, his arm tight around his daughter, brushed past us without a backward glance. “For my money, you can keep Lynn Hall,” he told me with mystifying intensity. “Stitch up everything in sight. Did you see those fire-breathing horses? And that huge guy with the horns coming out of his head?”

  Even Jane had made it across the lawn, gripping Agatha with one hand and her walker with the other, to peer into the wood.

  She barked, “Did I just see what I think I saw?”

  “I thought it was beautiful,” Lacey said gently, as I passed her to join Iris. “All the fireflies and those strange, lovely faces in the moonlight…”

  “Owen!” Iris exclaimed. “Where on earth have you been?”

  “Waiting for Sylvia in the wrong wood,” I told her, and asked Sylvia, “How did you find your way back?

  She shook her head slightly; her face, all its reserve melted away, looked a trifle dazed, and oddly peaceful. “I found one end of Gram’s thread in a drawer and followed it back to a Fiber Guild meeting,” she answered vaguely.

  The humorless Charlotte drifted past us to put an arm around a tree and stare wordlessly into the wood.

  “Charlotte?” Iris said. “Are you all right? Charlotte?”

  “I had no idea…” she whispered.

  “What?”

  She looked briefly at us, an expression on her face it probably hadn’t worn in twenty years. Then she wandered into the woods, in the wake of some vision. Sylvia smiled; Iris sighed.

  “I hope I did the right thing,” she said, rubbing her eyes tiredly.

  “You were magnificent,” I told her.

  “Was I? Are you sure, Owen?”

  “Yes,” Sylvia and I said together.

  “Where did Tyler go?” she asked fretfully. “He just got back, and now he’s gone again—”

  Sylvia put an arm around her, turned her toward the house. “He’s in the kitchen, Gram. He said Judith wouldn’t let him eat or drink there.”

  “That was my fault. So many things are my fault… Morgana’s secrets, you running away from home—”

  “Gram, let’s go in; we’re all tired.”

  “Even Owen afraid to tell me things—”

  “How did you know?” I asked her, stunned.

  “Dorian announced your love affair to the Fiber Guild. Come in with us? I’d like to hear more about it.”

  “Yes. In a moment.”

  I waited more than a moment, until all the women had gone, and even Charlotte had come back from her private dream. Until even the fireflies had gone elsewhere. But no kindly gesture from the woodland queen granted me my wish, and I could only rue the bygone day.

  22

  Syl


  I left Lynn Hall a few days later, flew back home to put my store in order, and find someone to do my job for the rest of the summer. Madison met me at the airport. I think I fell in love again at the sight of him: his big-boned, easy grace, his long black hair, most of all the smile that flashed out of all of him when he saw me. I could love him, I thought dazedly. I didn’t have to be afraid.

  Later, we curled up in my bed, eating Chinese food out of boxes and talking. I had the soy sauce and fortune cookies on my side of the bed; he had the wine and most of the napkins. We reached across heedlessly when we needed something, endangering each other with waving chopsticks. I dropped rice on his pillowcase; he spilled soy sauce on my silk pajamas.

  “Never mind,” I said, and took them off, and tossed them over the end of the bed. Madison stared at me.

  “What’s happened to you? You just—you just threw your clothes on the floor. You didn’t get out of bed and put them neatly into the hamper.”

  “I know,” I said, hardly believing myself. “Life’s messy?”

  “You learned that in a week? At a funeral?”

  “Sort of.”

  Someday I’d tell him, I thought. Or he would guess. Or not. It didn’t matter yet, and when it did, I would find a way.

  “Your grandmother is fierce,” he commented, refilling our glasses. I started, shaking wine onto the sheets.

  “You talked to her?” My voice squeaked. “She didn’t tell me.”

  “Well, I’d hardly call it a conversation. I told her who I was—and that I wanted to marry you, so she’d take me seriously—and asked if I could possibly talk to you. She said she had no idea and then there was this bang in my ear.”

  “She has an old-fashioned dial phone.”

  “A what?”

  “What day was that?”

  “Ah—Saturday night, it would have been.”

  The shortest night in the year, the longest night of my life…

  “She really didn’t know where I was then,” I told him. “She was worried.”

  “Where were you?”

  I floundered. “Out. Looking for Tyler. He went missing, too.”

  Madison gave me a long, clear-eyed look, as though he glimpsed the tale that thereby hung. But he shelved that for now, to my relief, and took another bite of mandarin beef. “I almost flew out then and there,” he said calmly. “That message you left had me a bit worried. You changed your mind so fast about needing me.”

  “I did,” I sighed, remembering the call under the hydrangea bush. Already it seemed a decade ago. “That was when Gram told me that I’d inherited Lynn Hall. It scared me. What she might want from me.”

  “So what does she want?”

  “Nothing much now,” I said contentedly, stretching like a cat, my chopsticks probably decorating the wall behind me with sauce. “Just to spend a month or two with her this summer, helping her fix the hall up. She and Hurley will stay there for as long as they want. When it’s empty, I’ll decide then what to do with it.”

  “I’m coming out there,” Madison warned me, “when my summer class ends. So don’t go falling in love with anybody else.”

  “Don’t you, either.”

  He looked at me, surprised. “Really?”

  “Really,” I said soberly. “Really, truly.”

  He gave me a winey, mandarin kiss, and then looked at me again, silently, steadily. “Okay, then,” he said softly, and put his arms around me, spilling my wine again on both of us, like some ancient ritual blessing.

  Tyler spent a good part of the summer at Lynn Hall, too, helping us now and then as we painted, chose wallpapers and linoleum, replaced curtains, dealt with the formidable clutter in the attic. He and Hurley went fishing together; Hurley taught him to use his drill and lathe, which Tyler managed without losing fingers. He talked about his father, thoughts and memories spilling out at random. Once, while we were in the attic, packing Gram’s discards in boxes for the local thrift shop, he talked about what happened in the wood.

  “It hardly seems real now,” he told me. “More like a dream. Is it that way for you?” I shook my head. “Oh. Well, mostly I was curled up in a ball on a sheepskin, thinking about my dad. Or I was following Judith around. She and I only have each other to talk about that part. She says I should keep it secret. That no one will believe me. Do you think that’s true?”

  “Not entirely. You’ll meet a few people around here, I think, who will believe you. Just be patient. You’ll learn to recognize them.”

  He was silent a moment, rolling old juice glasses in newspaper. “I understand what the queen was trying to do,” he said finally. “Why she did what she did. But mostly, I felt like she just brought me to a place in a fairy tale where I needed to be most. Where I didn’t have to do anything but think about my dad. And be miserable. As sad and angry and hopeless as I wanted to be.”

  I swallowed, remembering the place where she had brought me. “She has a gift for that.”

  “And then Judith came, and helped me.” He smiled. “Just what I needed. You look at the queen of the wood one way, and she’s beyond wicked. Stealing children, making humans get lost in her world. Look at her another way—and there’s a different story.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” I murmured. “That’s what all those old tales say. Maybe this is what happened, maybe that. Something happened, that’s what we know for sure. The story changes every time you take another look at it. It changes into what you need most at the moment you choose to look at it.”

  Tyler was silent again, maybe swallowing that, maybe not. He only said, “Nothing really changed. My dad is still dead. Grandpa Liam is still dead. My mom is still married to Patrick. What’s different is that I can see things a little more clearly. Like when I get a new pair of glasses. I see what I’ve been missing.”

  “I know that feeling.”

  “Really? I thought you already had everything figured out.”

  “I only thought I did.”

  “Well, how can you tell the difference between thinking you do and really doing it?”

  “You can’t. You can’t see what you can’t see until you can see it.”

  “Well, how do you—” He gave up, smiling. “Never mind. I guess you have to be there.”

  “You will,” I promised him. “You’ll outgrow Patrick so fast he’ll be missing that green-haired boy before he realizes he never knew you.”

  Tyler grunted. “I’m thinking of bleaching it. Judith said that’d look cool with my black eyebrows.”

  “There. You see?”

  “See what?”

  Judith, I thought. Fashion. Passion. “You’re already on your way beyond Patrick.”

  Gram didn’t call a guild meeting the next month. She needed to think, she said. She needed some peace and quiet, is what she told the incredulous members who called to remonstrate. They were the ones who hadn’t seen Gram’s confrontation with the wood. All they knew was that for the first time in a hundred years, there was no monthly meeting. It was, Jane told Gram, as if the moon had decided not to rise on that night. But it was a comment, not a criticism; she understood as well as Gram that they needed to rethink their stitches. Gradually the story of that night made its rounds, over cups of coffee, in the supermarket parking lot, at the Village Grill, where Genevieve passed what she had seen to discerning customers, along with mugs of beer and burger baskets.

  “I’m glad Iris is thinking about it,” she told me when I stopped in one slow evening and we had the bar to ourselves. “I wouldn’t want to make that decision. I mean, that Tyler-clone turned into a tree stump right in front of me. I don’t know how far we can trust them. But if I never had to crochet another baby bootie, I’d be beyond ecstatic.”

  Gram finally talked about it with me, when we sat out on the porch one tranquil night, smelling the roses and watching the coracle moon sail above the pear tree.

  “I can understand it better now,” she said abruptly, out of nowhere, I thought, but I was w
rong.

  “What, Gram?”

  “Why Liam loved to ramble. He was never afraid. The wood was never something to be kept tied up in stitches. Water was just water; it didn’t have to be guarded, feared for, mistrusted. It was just something lovely going its own way under the stars. I could never see those fireflies without wondering what they were hiding. Or pass a hollow tree without trying to remember whose stitches were guarding it. I still do. But now I find myself looking at it the way Liam might have. Wondering, if I stepped inside the hollow, what I’d feel, or smell, or hear. If for an instant, I’d think like that tree.”

  I smiled at the thought of Gram inside a tree. “Did he really do that?”

  “Owen said he did. He’d walk in drifts of autumn leaves. He’d skip stones on water, walk on fallen trunks. He’d play in the woods like a child. All the while I fretted and counted stitches and tried to sew the world into order.”

  “What will you do, Gram?”

  “About the Fiber Guild?” She was silent a little, gazing into the dark, listening, maybe, as I was, for the faint jingle of harness bells, for a distant voice that was neither human nor animal. “It’s very old, and could be very powerful, if we need it to be. And it creates, as well as binds. I won’t disband it. But maybe, for a while, we could just sew. Concentrate on what we make instead of what we control. See what happens.”

  “Are you going to undo all the old bindings?”

  She shook her head. “There’s enough wide open now. The old spells will fall apart eventually with time, if we don’t need them.” She paused again. “We’ll see. At least, I will as long as my old threads hold together. After that, you’ll have to make decisions.”

  “I will,” I promised her. “But don’t be in any hurry to leave me. You know I can barely thread a needle.”

  The Fiber Guild met again the following month, on the night Madison was flying in to visit us. His class had ended; he was bringing his fishing pole, he said, his camera, his binoculars and bird books, and an assortment of instruments, including a fiddle, spoons, and a nose harp.

  “Might learn a few old tunes in those mountains,” he told me with enthusiasm. It occurred to me to wonder then which of us might have to drag the other away.